When Amazon purchased Whole Foods last month, it didn’t just get the retail locations. It picked up Whole Foods’s baggage as well. Among the bigger issues inherited by Amazon appears to be a four-month investigation from the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere that challenges Whole Foods’s core selling point of healthy and humane food.

The group accused Pitman Family Farms, the maker of Mary’s Free Range Chicken and a supplier to Whole Foods in six Western states, of breaking its promises of free-range environments for its birds.

Direct Action Everywhere, whose mission is to create animal welfare-friendly cities and outlaw factory farming practices, visited a dozen Pitman farms and never once saw a chicken roaming outside. The group reported that it found no indications of outdoor living, such as feathers or fecal matter. Twenty-four hour surveillance cameras attached to six separate locations revealed no outdoor birds either, the activists said. Instead, chickens were packed shoulder-to-shoulder inside dusty sheds with degraded air quality, forced to challenge one another for access to food and water.

Video of Direct Action Everywhere’s findings showed scattered fighting among the chickens and smaller birds with injuries, including one with its eye pecked out. They also alleged evidence of “debeaking,” a procedure involving severing the tip of a chicken’s beak with a laser to prevent pecking.

Video: Direct Action Everywhere

“We saw things that even shocked us,” Wayne Hsiung, co-founder of the group, told The Intercept in an interview. Hsiung characterized the overcrowding as the worst he’s ever seen at a poultry farm, with investigators were nearly unable to walk through the flocks without stepping on birds.

The investigation took place from January to May at roughly a dozen Pitman farm locations in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Hsiung alleged no meaningful difference between the farms and reported no evidence of free-range activity. “We couldn’t find a single bird outside,” he said.

GAP rates farms with a “five step” scale. Most of Pitman’s facilities — including the ones visited by Direct Action Everywhere — carry a three rating, meaning that birds have space to move around; an outdoor free-range area with shade and at least 25 percent vegetative cover; farmers don’t use growth hormones or antibiotics in feed; and birds do not undergo physical alterations like debeaking. Videos on the Pitman website showcase its one “step 5” farm, according to the GAP ratings, where birds live permanently on pasture. Direct Action Everywhere claims the conditions at the farms it visited were markedly different.

While activists confirmed that Pitman used “slow-growing” Rhode Island Red chickens, which aren’t bred to grow very big quickly and have fewer health problems, the conditions alleged at the farm actually prolong the birds’ suffering, according to Hsiung. “Cage-free, slow-growing, it’s not better or worse, just different,” he said. “These animals have to endure a longer life in miserable conditions.”

Because the farms are so massive, with tens of thousands of animals sometimes supervised by a single employee, activists found it easy to access the sheds. “You just walk in. They even have unlocked doors,” said Hsiung.

Direct Action Everywhere claimed that it’s now impossible to secure undercover employment at these sites, previously a common technique employed by animal rights activists. When the activists get reports of mistreatment, they feel a moral and legal necessity to step in, citing law journal reviews on the subject. “When we know a company is lying, we open up the doors,” he said.

Pitman Family Farms sells poultry through high-end markets, such as Whole Foods in California, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Nevada, and Hawaii, and employs a workforce of around 500 employees at over 80 different sites. Product quality and animal welfare is a hallmark of the Mary’s Free Range Chicken brand.

Pitman Farms’s David Rubenstein told The Intercept late Thursday night, “At Pitman Farms, we raise chickens for many different customers. The barn in question houses chickens that are not part of the slow growth or free-range programs.” He added that “the farm shown in the video is not GAP certified.” The chickens in the video were being housed to “help protect them from outside disease and will be soon transferred to another barn, where eggs will be harvested,” Rubenstein said.

Pitman Farms’s website does not describe any products aside from free-range chicken, nor does it say they use non-GAP farms or sell eggs. The brand is built around animal welfare; in promotional videos, members of the Pitman family speak of how animal welfare is implemented across their farming enterprise. “All of the chickens we raise, we call them ‘free-range,'” said Rick Pitman in one video. Nowhere in Pitman Farms’s promotional material is any mention made of farms that don’t comply with humane standards. Direct Action Everywhere claims that they visited a dozen Pitman farms with no appreciable difference in the conditions. Rubenstein, however, insisted, “Without a doubt, the Mary’s branded packages claiming ‘free-range’ and sold at Whole Foods were grown on farms certified and audited by the Global Animal Partnership.”

“Time and time again, they make the same robotic denial.”

Within hours of Direct Action Everywhere releasing their report, Whole Foods’s Twitter feed responded to complaints with theexactsamelanguage: “We don’t source chicken from the facility in this video; we only source chicken from Pitman farms that are GAP certified for animal welfare.” A Whole Foods spokesperson made the same assertion to The Intercept: The chickens in the video are not from a GAP-certified facility, nor are they processed where Whole Foods’s GAP-rated chickens are handled.

The Pitman website indicates that all their farms are GAP-rated, so it’s unclear how there could be an unrated farm from which Whole Foods doesn’t acquire chickens. Hsiung expressed skepticism at Whole Foods’s response to the controversy. “We have reached out to Whole Foods to show them investigations,” he said. “Time and time again, they make the same robotic denial.” Hsiung also alleged that Whole Foods tweeted their denials before they could reasonably have checked in with Pitman to investigate.

Consumers have shown growing interest in more humanely raised food, including free-range chickens. But there is no recognized federal definition of “free-range” or “pasture-raised” goods in food labeling. The Food Safety Inspection Service allows these terms to be placed on poultry if agribusinesses “provide a brief description of the birds’ housing conditions.” While the claims are supposed to be evaluated, there is virtually no on-site confirmation. The U.S. Department of Agriculture often relies on third-party verifications like GAP, including for Mary’s Free Range Chicken.

“The industry is in bed with the government,” said Hsiung. “I’m a former securities lawyer. It’s similar to the financial industry. The USDA’s mission statement is to promote agriculture. You can’t promote the industry and guard against the industry’s abuses. It’s like trying to be a lawyer for both sides of a litigation.”

This is Direct Action Everywhere’s second investigation alleging a Whole Foods supplier claiming inaccurate “free-range” standards. Revelations against Diestel Turkey Ranch in 2015 led to a California lawsuit for false advertising. The case is still pending.

Amazon has faced negative headlines for problems with working conditions at its warehouses. By buying a grocery, they face a whole new set of risks from suppliers, which could damage its reputation as a high-end provider.

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Kinda sad to see this story come out. I’ve been buying Pitman Farm chicken for about 1.5yrs now, paying 2-3 times as much as other brands, and it turns out it’s roughly all the same. I kinda feel tricked and manipulated.

Great article and sorry I missed it.
I buy those chickens and have bought two since you wrote this.
I’m horrified to learn this about “Mary’s Chickens” …what a scam.
I noticed last week the chicken seemed different, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
F this Rubenstein and Whole Foods and with Amazon, who I refuse to buy anything online from, I’m back to farmer’s markets.
I don’t need to eat those poor chickens.

People are seriously trying to put down vegans rather than focus on the issue at hand? A large corporation is lying to consumers!! Hello? It’s theft. Custoners are paying for a product they are purchasing under false pretenses. Wake up people. You just got robbed. But yes, this treatment of animals is nothing short of cruel and that is fact regardless of your dietary habits.

This is a little off tobic but ….
Everyone should read ther author’s 2016 book Chain of Title. I only read this article because I noticed his name.

His book covers an aspect of the 2008 mortgage meltdown that has not been covered elsewhere. Namely, the financial institutions that sliced, diced, bundled, and resold all the mortgages failed to record the assignments and sales as required by 300 years of common law property law.

According to the law, the home residents should not have been evicted by parties having no proof of ownership. The courts looked the other way as the ‘proof’ was back dated, and forged, together with forged notary signatures.

Being vegan or vegetarian doesn’t absolve anyone of animal cruelty — unless the only animals that these folks are concerned about are domestic ones. Industrial agriculture requires deforestation and destruction of wild animal habitats. Millions of animals, birds & insects are killed every year for so-called “cruelty free” vegan and vegetarian diets. The simple fact is that there are far too many humans for the planet to support so no type of industrialized food production is free of cruelty and deaths of animal (and wild plant) life.

So you’re claiming that because agriculture is going to result in the deaths of some species, there’s no point in purposely leaving out cows, chickens, fish, etc. as well? That’s rather nihilistic. 400 million animals were killed for food last year because of the growing rate of vegans/vegetarians and those who simply have made an effort to reduce their meat consumption. That’s certainly something. Deforestation is is also a huge part of animal agriculture, since the majority of the soy and corn we grow on this planet is used to feed livestock, so we can eat them later. If we just grew crops it would actually use less land AND water (and thus fewer animals displaced/killed). Don’t take my word for it though. It’s well documented. The fact of the matter is that by going vegan or vegetarian, far fewer animals will be killed.

The solution is simple, easy and just. Go vegan. If we care about nonhumans, the only fair way to live up to that belief is to not use them for food, clothing, entertainment, or any other purpose.

Veganism is not about us or our “lifestyle.” Veganism is about animals who are the victims of unnecessary harm and death. Taste, convenience, and habit are not good enough reasons to harm and kill animals.

If we care about animals, go vegan. Any other choice simply doesn’t make sense. A great place to get started is http://www.HowDoIGoVegan.com

We need to get tough on these claims of these farms being free-range. We go to the store pay more money and make a conscious decision to by these products with these claims only to be lied to. How wrong is this! Disgusting! Hopefully like myself more and more people will raise their own chickens in a humane way and know their eggs are coming from a good place and not such a filthy inhumane conditions for these animals. Screw trusting big business! Hit them in their pockets!

It is telling that some vegetarians and vegans on this post use fairly destructive language as it pertains to their feelings about what others should eat. A healthy and contented person has no need to do so. Further, you would never find these same people trying to change nature or dictate to lions or cheetahs about how they should eat; forcing them not to chase down zebras and kill them for food, because they understand that mammals in the animal kingdom are endowed by nature with very different metabolic requirements. Well, humans are also mammals in the animal kingdom with very different autonomic functioning and metabolic histories from person to person and family to family. Many years ago I was very sick and my doctor put me on a minimum of a half-pound of organic fatty red meat at least 5 times per week. My cholesterol promptly went from 220 to 130, where it has remained for over 20 years. I have enjoyed excellent health since. The lesson is that one must be very careful what they tell others to eat because metabolic requirements vary greatly from person to person and there really is no single size but literally multitudes of possibilities based upon many, many factors. The human body is not concerned with the ethics of what you eat. It only knows what it needs.

This investigation has nothing to do with what you should or shouldn’t eat. It has to do with the inhumane treatment of animals. Why would you claim that eating chicken raised in the conditions described in the article (and even worse one, when chicken are housed in cages on top of other so that their excrement falls on the bird below and their feet get damaged by the wires on which they are made to stand) mean that you shouldn’t eat chicken raised in humane condition?

There is also the issue of false advertising. If Whole Food claims all its chicken are pastured and then it turns out they are not, and you’re paying a premium price for pastured chicken, wouldn’t you object?

You seem to have totally misunderstood the article. Ask yourself why?

As for the human body not concerned with the ethics of what you eat, does it mean you don’t object to cannibalism? (see for example the satirical piece (1729) by Jonathan Swift “A Modest Proposal”. You’ll find all of your arguments about the human body “not being concerned with the ethics of what you eat”

“Many years ago I was very sick and my doctor put me on a minimum of a half-pound of organic fatty red meat at least 5 times per week. My cholesterol promptly went from 220 to 130, where it has remained for over 20 years. I have enjoyed excellent health since.”

You are not concerned with ethics, and obviously the treatment of animals in captivity for your consumption is unimportant to you. Well said.
What an enlightened being you are! Worthy of ‘god’s’ best creation.

You will never see investigative journalism such as this on 60 Minutes, they’re in bed with big business. You rock Intercept! I’m fortunate to know my farmer where I know how the animals are raised and cared for.

This is very upsetting as we have been buying this brand, Mary’s chicken for two years now. We dont eat beef, so we eat alot of this chicken and felt guilt free because atleast we figured the chickens were living decent lives before they were slaughtered. This has changed everything and i feel disgusted. We watched the videos on their website of them moving the chickens around their ranges and it seemed too good to be true. Very very disappointing… Guess its time to go full vegan.

I am beyond pissed since I eat 95% vegan, but on rare occasions I would treat myself to Mary’s chicken from WF thinking it was more humane.
I had wondered about the farm (if it was greenwashing) and checked out the website, ultimately believing their branding—that they were happy chickens from California. But this unhappy human is done with Mary’s.

Mostly a non story for those who have done extensive research into the poultry industry due to personal health reasons. Here’s the recap. Only buy pasture raised organic chickens that are humanly slaughtered ( put into an unconscious state prior) and air chilled with no submerged bath. I cou ld go into details but the only chicken I’ve found that is commercially produced is Smart Chicken. (not an ad)

I care about the animal welfare , but quality wins out for me in the end. I love Smart Chicken….it is far far superior in flavor and quality to any other I have tried, and the humane practices are a big plus. Whole Foods chicken I have always found to be inedible, dry and tough. Just gave it another try recently and it’s still awful. My personal opinion.

I imagine Whole Foods has been losing quite a few customers as well they should what with Amazon and its dirty little fingers all over it. This just adds to the reasons not to shop there. I’ve been buying local chicken, beef and lamb for years and I wouldn’t do otherwise. It is simply better tasting and more nutritious. Another great story by The Intercept.

It’s very hard to bring charges against free range chicken producers for violating their commitments, because of the code of omertà that exists among chickens. Note that Mr. Dayen was unable to interview even a single chicken for this story. It’s probably not for lack of trying; chickens simply refuse to talk to outsiders. Until the code is broken, justice will never be done.

I imagine WF is in the midst of losing a lot of customers as well they should. What with the dirty little fingers of Amazon and now this. I have been buying local poultry, beef and lamb for years and I wouldn’t do otherwise. It tastes better and is far more nutritious. Another great piece of reporting by The Intercept.

Which is why I live in a rural area and buy eggs directly from the farmers. Though sometimes the chickens can get rather tetchy when I go to buy the eggs. I also get raw milk, usually from the farmers with Jersey instead of Holstein cows as they have more Vitamin A rich cream (here the Tntercept will screech that the FDA and USDA isn’t doing its job preventing me from getting whatever because it isn’t pasteurized and how we need huge crushing government regulation to fine and imprison the farmers to protect me from getting raw milk directly from a farmer).

“free range” and “organic” are just ways of saying “i only approve of an animal dying in total terror witth its throat slit and its organs pulled out its cloaca (look it up) if it’s good for ME!” i bet these are the same people who think we’re “bringing democracy” to the world through peace bombs.

if the thought of something suffering actually bothered these ignorant hipsters they wouldn’t eat meat in the first place. now if you’ll excuse me i’m off to pray for outbreaks of e coli and mad cow.

Whole Foods also sells tons of excitotoxins such as glutamate (MSG, monosodium glutamate) that is hidden using many different ‘trick’ words under ‘ingredients’. “Excitotoxicity is the pathological process by which nerve cells are damaged or killed by excessive stimulation by neurotransmitters such as glutamate…by glutamatergic storm”. (Wikipedia)

Everyone has heard about headaches as a result of ingesting MSG, but it turns out MSG is far more dangerous than just the occasional headache. Glutamate has a central role in obesity, heart disease, cancer, autism, neurodegenerative diseases, infertility, diabetes, depression and other mood & learning disorders—all of which have reached epidemic proportions. This is because the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain is glutamate (in very tiny, precisely controlled amounts!) and pouring large quantities of MSG into the body causes havoc by overwhelming and exciting the nerve cells to death. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lets food companies hide MSG under all sorts of disguised words so most of us are eating this stuff at every meal without being aware of it.

Note that only when the additive is 99% or more MSG must it be labeled under ingredients as ‘MSG’. So if there is 98% MSG in a product then Whole Foods can claim “no MSG”. Often there are 2, 3 or 4 of the code words mentioned above found under ‘ingredients’ for just one product, meaning there are that many different additions of MSG in just that one product. Even (or especially) when you see the words “no MSG” or “no MSG added” you know to be on the lookout for the hidden MSG. And when a restaurant says there is no MSG in their food they may sincerely believe that but they are unaware of the myriad disguised words under which MSG is hidden in all their sauces, condiments, etc. Virtually all of restaurant (and hospital) food is therefore loaded with MSG; ditto for many or most packaged products in the grocery stores including Whole Foods.

Whole Foods sells a lot of MSG in products such as broth; chips; soups; sauces; spices (Bragg’s, Spike, etc); salad dressings; condiments; soy milk and soy products; low fat and no fat milk products; protein bars, powders & drinks; vitamins; pet food; waxes applied to fresh fruit and vegetables; packaged and deli meats; frozen dinners, vegetarian chicken broth in bulk section, etc. The ‘vegetarian chicken broth powder’ is up to 50% MSG (“autolyzed yeast”) and pregnant women who eat this are bathing the fetal brain in the very neurotransmitter which is used to control brain development.

“Glutamate is the most abundant used neurotransmitter in the brain and exceeds all the others put together. It makes up 90% of the neurotransmission in the cortex, and 50% of the total brain’s neurotransmission. It also controls other neurotransmitters including serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine. Glutamate plays a major role in neural and brain development, from inside the uterus through the critical first four years of life. We discovered that there are numerous glutamate receptors in all organs and tissues. The entire GI tract, from the esophagus to the colon, has numerous glutamate receptors. The entire electrical conducting system of a heart is replete with all sorts of glutamate receptors. The lungs, the ovaries, all the reproductive systems and sperm itself, adrenal glands, bones and even calcification are all controlled by glutamate receptors.”
(Dr Russell Blaylock, MD neurosurgeon, retired)https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1ek5-MW4qJcWURNRXlJT1RhaWc

Because it makes people eat more than they otherwise would and thereby boosts the profits of those food companies. Having essentially no taste of its own MSG has, however, the startling effect when mixed with food of stimulating the nerves and brain to make it seem like something ‘exciting’ is happening in the mouth.

One of the major implications of the article is that Whole Foods profits from ‘sub-standard’ food, including food which is mislabeled and misrepresented.

In this case, chicken. And the major way sub-standard food is made to taste ‘good’ is with MSG. MSG can, for instance, make a vat of chicken soup made with two chickens taste like it was made with ten chickens. And much of the food Whole Food sells has hidden forms of MSG in it. The MSG doesn’t just make stuff taste ‘better'; it makes people eat more than they should, beyond the point when they are full. While it is doing this, it is also, through excitotoxicity, causing lesions (‘cuts’) on the hypohthalamus, damaging this incredibly important part of the brain.

Whole Foods doesn’t care that their hidden forms of MSG is causing major health and behavior problems including mood disorders, because hidden forms of MSG helps make Whole Food a lot more money than it otherwise would.

Both of these companies – Whole Foods and Pittman – when faced with the truth, lie, just the way Trump lies. Time and again investigations have proven that Whole Foods lies that such products as Diestel dead turkeys and now Mary’s (dead) Chicken are raised in a humane way. We call that the humane lie. Don’t believe it. Don’t be played by these corporations.

Whole Foods probably controls this “Global Animal Partnership.” We have real co-ops in our city – Minneapolis – that sell organic/cage-free/fair-trade/vegan etc. foods.If you don’t trust your store to check on this stuff, then it is just a way to get more money for the same factory product. The co-ops here are more reliable and do their own checking … because they are no some national corporation.

I want a factual confirmation with video and undercover reporting as to which chicken brand actually has the supplied birds growing up free range on the pasture. This industrial food production is disgusting time and again, but the animal activists haven’t shown me the alternative. Do I have to grow happy birds in my own backyard or is there a reliable supplier/brand that does it for me ?

Go to the farmer’s market and buy directly from the farmer. Visit her farm and see the living conditions for yourself. Or if you don’t have a local farmer’s market, buy from local farms you can find on EatWild.com or have some pasture-raised meat shipped to you frozen. There are lots of farms shipping pasture-raised / grass-fed meat these days.

Go to localharvest.org and type in your zip code and you can find farms in your area, what they sell, how they raise/produce it and you can visit the farm and see for yourself what’s going on. When you buy local, the money stays in the community – another benefit.

Not true. There is an alternative to eating factory farmed meat that isn’t going vegan. It’s finding real farms that raise animals a responsible way. Please check out our chicken operation, http://www.pasturebird.com, we are revolutionizing poultry production with a system that’s good for the land, animals, and consumers. We raise animals 24/7 outside on pasture with zero vaccines, antibiotics, or drugs. They forage for grasses, bugs, seeds, and worms, and we rotate them every single day to fresh pasture so their manure becomes fertilizer for the next grass crop. It’s a truly regenerative system. You do have alternatives!

Thank you! Shows how absurd these claims are. It’s time we start treating animals like the individuals they are, not like property or commodities to use as humans please. There is NO WAY to kill someone humanely.

Please wake up people. The only way to get good humanly produced food is to GROW IT YOURSELF! Or at least know the producer personally ie Local food. Everything else is corporate lies packed for your consumption.

I have always been a little suspicious of the whole Organic foods thing. Who is to say that they aren’t just sticking an organic label on the identical food and just charging twice as much? This story kind of confirms some of my suspicions.

Another example of an America industry scamming the public. Create the illusion of a caring,humane, organic company, then feed the public shit at the highest prices and profit. Par for the course because much of American is based on hucksterism and lies. Two words: Due diligence, but still remain skeptical because these people are really good and have years of experience selling lies.

whatever makes you feel good about your horrible selfish behavior, rite? i guess millions of chinese over hundreds of years have all been “pretentious” and “middle class”? you’re just blurting out random adjectives so you must be really insecure.

i’m fine with it, though…knowing you’ll probably suffer from a debilitating health condition is a ray of light on a cloudy day. because you deserve it. there i’ve said it.

Carolyn Zaremba you are so full of your own animal-torture crap! I, for one, live on government subsidies (SSI, food stamps) and of the dozens and dozens of vegans I have met since my own conversion eight years ago are low- or very-low-income citizens. Veganism is neither pretentious, nor middle-class, nor crap. It is a lofty expression of compassion for the fellow-humans who have evolved into separate trees from ourselves. i hope you will one day soon wake up to this, Carolyn Zaremba.

There’s a good reason why there has never been a society or even a small tribal group that has willingly chosen a vegan diet. It’s simply not a healthy long term choice. And pointing out someone who is doing well on veganism is not a counter argument any more than pointing out an old smoker who is cancer free as an argument that smoking is not healthy.

If there is a god, if… he has to reclaim the earth because one species is consuming most of the other species for the purpose of survival. I don’t think Jesus or others can do it. This time he has to get involved directly

At least those chickens are freeier than American sheeple immersed in torpor of freedom and prosperity. At least chickens know that they are about to be tortured, murdered and devoured like anybody else.

One of the first things I learned about food shopping is to never buy the store brand chicken. Even the big brand names in the US are pretty awful, as anyone who has ever eaten a chicken in France can attest. So it does not surprise me that the only difference among the various WF chicken varieties are in the labels and the prices.

BTW the deception is not just limited to chickens. Next time you’re in a WF, take a gander at the peanut butter. Their ‘organic’ variety is laced with sugar; their ordinary stuff is not.

I say all this as a WF customer. For certain things (bread; beef; lamb) they are unbeatable.

What does that mean “not for human consumption”. Rapeseed is from the mustard family. Do you use mustard, cabbage, broccoli, or other brassicas? Canola oil is one of the most healthy of oils. Stop spreading such nonsense.